1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing technique for a printing system including a document management server in a network, and an image forming apparatus which prints a document in the document management server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Direct printing in an image forming apparatus is a technique of transferring a file directly to an image forming apparatus without conversion of the file by a personal computer (PC), instead converting the file in the image forming apparatus, and printing. In other words, printing is possible even if neither an application nor a viewer is installed in the PC. However, the image forming apparatus needs to have a function of converting a file.
A substitute printing technique has been proposed as a technique of printing, by another image forming apparatus, a file or job which cannot be processed by an image forming apparatus that the user wants (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-152725).
In the conventional technique, a server which manages substitute printing grasps the function, that is, the printing capability, of each image forming apparatus. With the spread of cloud computing technology and the like, the server is highly likely to reside on the Internet. More specifically, the image forming apparatus and server exist in a network beyond a firewall and cannot communicate with each other. In this environment, the server cannot determine what kind of file is printable by each image forming apparatus in the current printing system status.